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Everything : and other performance texts from Germany
Drawn from theatre events variously described as documentary, post-dramatic, and live art, the texts collected here seldom look or read like plays-some comprise rules for improvisation; others could best be described as theatrical scenarios; a few are transcripts; one includes a soup recipe. Yet amid these dramaturgical tests and trials, one finds poetry: heartbreaking stories of disability and triumph as well as strange, disjointed fairy tales interrupted by communist songs. This volume is an extension of the original theatrical experiments.
Book
Love Me: From Politics to Ethics at the Berliner Ensemble
Reading the news about theatre in Germany during the past few years, it is hard to avoid the impression that something new is happening: a theatre culture that long emphasized politics now just as often emphasizes ethics. There were the 2022 protests in Munich over claimed anti-Semitism in the play Vögel (Birds of a Kind) by Wajdi Mouawad, which led the Metropoltheater to cancel its planned production. Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg tried to make programming and ensemble changes to the Schauspielhaus Zürich, which they co-led, but the institution's governing board decided not to renew their contracts amid accusations that the theatre had become too “woke” for its audiences. Most prominently, a new artistic team at the prestigious Theatertreffen festival in Berlin curated in 2023 a series of events to coincide with its traditional presentation of the year's ten “most notable” productions. These events included a “Responsibility Treffen” that looked “at how we can show our responsibility toward those who have lost the personal and structural circumstances necessary for working in the theatre.”
Journal Article
Prelapsarian
The Berlin Wall, die Mauer, is something of a disembodied soul, its material gone to dust, its absence ever more absent. Walking, spazierien, through Prenzlauer Berg, with its conspicuous consumption in the form of baby carriages and shops selling Scandinavian children's clothing, 100 percent bamboo, you might think: this was the West. You would be wrong. It's just crowded with migrants from Bavaria and America, the apartments chicly saniert and offered to folks like me on AirBnB. (In 1990, you could have bought an apartment for as much as you'll pay to crash there for two weeks in 2019.) To a newly arrived visitor, the Western districts of Neukölln, still ragged, and Wedding, miles of gray, might feel more like their imaginary of the East than Prenzlberg. In the thirty years since November 9, 1989, a generation has grown up without the Wall, while the generation that caused it to be built is dying off. Today, the Berlin Wall is a tourist trap. In the New York Times this past year, I read earnest debates about whether a Hard Rock Café (it would be Berlin's first) should be built next to Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie has been all but a Hard Rock Café for the entire time I've been occasionally living in Berlin, since 2003. A taxi driver gives me a mini-tour of the Wall as we drive from Tegel to Prenzlauer Berg, crossing and re-crossing the border. He knows his audience. Tourists want to see the Wall. Go to the East Side Gallery, with panels painted by graffiti artists in 1990, the longest stretch of the \"Berlin Wall\" still in existence. A symbol of a symbol, the East Side Gallery does not so much represent the Wall as represent our ideal mental image of it: tall and imposing, covered with graffiti.
Journal Article
Between the Wall and the Future
In October 2013, on a ten-month research fellowship from DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, Matt Cornish moved back to Berlin after a two-year absence. He found a theatre carving out different, vitally important ways to be political, while also hosting debates on potentially radical changes to the way art gets made and paid for in Germany. He found stages that have attracted artists who regard performance as national discourse and a tool for historical change, but not at the theatres he expected. The major Staatstheater, state-funded theatres, must now contend with the increasing cultural importance of the freie Szene, free-scene performance groups that create works in a range of media, and present them, most often, in spaces that do not host their own ensembles. Artists from the freie Szene and some politicians have been pushing for sweeping changes to the theatre system, far more than what happened in the 1990s, with important aesthetic consequences. Yet, despite the tremendous growth of the freie Szene in Germany in the past fifteen years, funding structures have barely changed since the 1980s.
Journal Article
Theatre of Potentiality: On A-Human Excess in Performances by Fabrice Mazliah, Felix Rothenhäusler, and Boris Nikitin
How can we conceive potentiality as the inherent future in any present as well as in any past? Contemporary examples of a “theatre of potentiality” include works by dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah; director Felix Rothenhäusler; and author, performer, director, and theoretician Boris Nikitin, who all share an interest in a-human excess: of things, words, bodies, and fictions.
Journal Article
Between the Wall and the Future: Report from Berlin
Berlin marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this past November with glowing, environmentally-friendly helium-balloon sculptures marking much of the length of the East/West border in Berlin: a solemn celebration. The division of Germany--the whys of that partition, the upset and dislocation of unification--no longer has political resonance.
Journal Article